BOB ROBERTS

Celebrated essayist, provocative novelist, inspired scriptwriter… Gore Vidal, who died yesterday at the age of 86, was an integral element of the American cultural landscape he so often criticized. For more than 60 years, he stirred the artistic and political pot, writing more than 25 books and running for office twice (unsuccessfully).

His third novel, The City and the Pillar, was one of the first books to deal frankly and unapologetically with a gay protagonist; it created a scandal in 1948 among both the book-reading public and critics. (For all of those reasons it has become an important work in gay literature.)